Just as our ancestors used stone tools to hunt, gather, and process their food, we use

26 Pages·2006·0.16 MB·English

Eight Bits About Digital Communication

By Lance Strate
Lance Strate is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham
University in New York City. He is the current and founding President of the Media
Ecology Association, and a Past President of the New York State Communication
Association. The co-editor of several anthologies, including Communication and
Cyberspace (now in its second edition), and The Legacy of McLuhan , he is also editor
of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology . He is currently writing a book entitled
Understanding Media Ecology .
I would like to express my gratitude to Octavio Islas, the "eighth man," for inviting me to
particpate in the V Bienal Iberoamericana de la Comunicación .
I imagine that many of you are familiar with the fact that five years after Christopher
Columbus set foot in the New World, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella reformed the
Spanish monetary system, standardizing the minting of royal coins or Reales . They also
created new coins in the denominations of half Reales, quarter Reales, and eighth
Reales. But so much silver was found in Mexico and elsewhere in the western
hemisphere, that it soon became possible to create coins of larger denominations, first
two reales, then four, and finally eight reales.
The ocho reales coin became known as the peso , which as you know means weight.
From antiquity, the value of coins was based on their weight in precious metals, and this
had much to do with what the coins were named. For example, in ancient Israel the
shekel was a measurement unit for weight before it became a monetary unit. The
talanton was an ancient Greek coin whose name originally referred to a weight used in a
scale; this is the origin of the word talent , something of value to be weighed in the
balance (a fact that sheds new light on the popular TV program, American Idol ). And in
Rome there was a coin known as the libra , the Roman word for pound; nowadays, we
think of Libra as a zodiac sign, Libra the Scales. The ancient libra coin is the ancestor of
the Italian lira, and also the British pound, which is why they use a modified letter "L"
(i.e., £ ) as their symbol. Interestingly enough, the English word pound comes from the
Latin word for weight, pondo , originally libra pondo which means a pound by weight,
and pondo is also the ancestor of the Spanish word peso .
For centuries, the ocho reales was the most widely circulated form of currency in the
world, enjoying a position analogous to the American dollar today. In fact, following the
American Revolution, the founding fathers refused to continue using English pounds,
and adopted the Spanish peso as their basic monetary unit. They gave it the name
"dollar," which is of Germanic origin, and substituted a metric system of one hundred
cents to the dollar rather than eight reales. But the Spanish dollar, as the peso came to
be called, continued to be accepted as legal tender in the United States up until 1857,
and in Canada until 1860. The quality of the silver was so pure that the Spanish dollar
was also known as an "honest dollar," a term that remained in circulation in the U.S.
long after the peso was demonetized.
Because the value of the coin was based on its weight, it was a common practice to
make change by cutting the ocho reales in half, quarters, or eighths. Based on this
practice, the phrase pieces of eight came into circulation, and was picked up in pirate
stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island . No doubt, real pirates
treasured their pieces of eight, and their dubloons, gold coins that were double the worth
of the silver dollar. And even though the United States had no coins that were the
equivalent of one eighth of a dollar, American children recited the nursery rhyme: "two
bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar." Two bits, in particular, became slang for the quarter, our
twenty-five cent piece, and a number of songs repeated the line, "shave and a haircut,
two bits." Following the stock market crash in 1929, "two bit" became an adjective
indicating that an item is cheap, second-rate, inferior. And while the pirates of the
Caribbean treasured pieces of eight, the pirates of the American stock exchange priced
their equities in denominations of one eighth of a dollar up until 1997, when they
switched to sixteenths; a decimal system was finally adopted in 2001. It is altogether
extraordinary that American stocks were priced in units that do not exist in the U.S.
monetary system into the twenty-first century.
But is it any less extraordinary to discover that there are pirates among us once again,
and that the pieces of eight that they treasure are not bits of silver and gold, but bits of
data and information? Putting software pirates aside for the moment, I think we can
assume that Claude Shannon knew something about the monetary meaning of the word
bit when he introduced its new meaning in 1948, as a contraction of the phrase binary
digit and the basic unit of information.
Eight years later, Werner Buchholz coined the term byte , spelling it with a y instead of
an i to avoid the potential for mistakes and confusion. The byte consists of eight bits-it is
the digital equivalent of the ocho reales. And multiples of eight are the rule in the digital
realm. For example, technically, a kilobyte is not 1,000 bytes, but rather 1,024 bytes,
while a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. My first
computer was an Atari 800, and it came with 16K of memory; I eventually increased it to
the maximum, which was 48K. And programmers writing software for those first personal
computers frequently worked in base sixteen systems known as hexadecimal.
You may find it interesting to know that hexadecimal is an unusual term, in that hexa
comes from the Greek for six while decimal is derived from the Latin for ten . It was
Buchholz's employers, IBM, who adopted this term because they were too embarrassed
to use the purely Latin term, sexidecimal. We can only be grateful that no one at IBM
brought up the fact that the numeral eight looks a lot like the female form.
I bring all this up because the number eight has a great deal of significance for us, in the
context of Iberoamerica and Angloamerica. And it has a great deal of significance for us
in the context of the theme of the V Bienal Iberoamericana de la Comunicación , which
involves applying the balance or scales, and weighing and evaluating our new era of
digital communication. And so, my plan is to provide you with eight bits of information,
which I hope will constitute one bite of knowledge, and perhaps even a small taste of
wisdom.
1. Crazy Eights
Crazy eights is the name of a card game in which the eight of spades, hearts, diamonds,
and clubs all are wild cards, and this is also a good name for my first bit which is about
the role of the number eight in digital communication. And you can call them crazy,
because at first glance counting by eights seems irrational, as opposed to counting by
tens, which seems both rational and natural.
In Understanding Media , Marshall McLuhan (2003) explored the idea that media are
extensions of the human body, and he argued that numbers are an extension of the
sense of touch. We certainly can see that base ten mathematics are an extension of our
fingers and toes, and that this makes counting by tens seem only natural. In fact, we can
count with our fingers (give me five!), count on our fingers, and also count by pointing at
objects in our environment. In all of these ways, we can see why the original meaning of
the word digit is finger, and why it later came to mean number as well.
Digital does not mean decimal, however, and it was the rise of modern science and the
Enlightenment that led to the creation and adoption of base ten systems, such as the
American monetary system of one hundred cents to the dollar, and the use of floating
point numbers, otherwise known as scientific notation. And following the French
Revolution, the metric system was introduced to increase the efficiency and ease of
measurements and calculations. Today, the United States is considered irrational in its
reluctance to adopt the metric system, although I expect that digital technologies will
soon speed the transition, or render it irrelevant.
Given the dominance of decimal systems, it seems crazy to count by eights. But in
reality it is far from irrational. For example, growing up in New York City, I spent a good
deal of time in pizza places, and always ordered pizza by the slice. And inevitably, there
were eight slices to the pie. Over and over again, I watched them take the pie out of the
oven, and cut them into eight slices. Why eight? Simply put, it is the most rational and
efficient way to divide a pizza. One cut and you have two halves, another and you have
four quarters; repeat the operation twice more and you have your slices of eight. The
same logic extends to coins such as the peso: cut it in half, cut the half in half to make a
quarter, and one more cut gives you two bits. Pieces of eight and slices of pizza both
reflect the logic of cutting.
The same is true of the binary logic of digital communication. Each bit of information
cuts possibilities in half. If there are two possibilities, such as determining whether a
number is even or odd, it takes one bit of information to eliminate the uncertainty. If
there are four possibilities, such as determining the suit of a playing card, it would take
two bits of information, one to determine whether the card is red or black, the other to
determine which of the two possible suits it is. If we have thirty-two possibilities, such as
the states of Mexico along with the federal district of Mexico City, it would take five bits
of information to cut the choices down to a certainty, each time reducing possibilities by
half.
It also takes as many as five bits when dealing with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet
(you would have to get down to sixteen possibilities to require only four bits). Include
both upper and lower case characters and we have fifty-two letters, which require six
bits of information. Add the numerals zero through nine, and punctuation marks, and we
have something on the order of eighty characters. At this point we need seven bits of
information, with room to add additional characters up to 128. And 128 is the magic
number of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, otherwise known
as ASCII. This is the basic alphanumeric code of digital communications, and it is for
this reason that the byte became the standard unit of measurement. The eighth bit was
originally used for error checking, representing for example how many ones as opposed
to zeroes appear in the rest of the byte.
In sum, eights are not so crazy, at least not in coins and computers. This process of
finding the rationale for human arrangements is sometimes known as cultural history.
But I want to stress the intersection between cultural history and media ecology, which is
the study of media environments. And this brings me to my second bit.
2. The Medium is the Message
I think of McLuhan's famous phrase, "the medium is the message" (2003, p. 17) as the
first axiom of media ecology, although it may be more accurate to refer to it as the first
aphorism of media ecology. It is an extraordinarily rich statement, and I have elsewhere
explored many of its meanings (see, for example, Strate, 2005), but time does not
permit me to do so here. Instead, I will simply suggest that McLuhan directs our
attention to the medium as a starting point for our investigations, and he and other
media ecologists use the term medium in its broadest sense to mean the forms and
materials that we utilize, and the means and methods that we employ.
For example, in the case of a pizza pie, given its form, its size and shape, and the use of
a pizza cutter, it makes perfect sense that it is cut four times to yield eight slices. Of
course it would be possible to divide the pie into six slices, which sometimes happens,
or ten slices for that matter. But the bias of the medium brings us back to eight time and
time again. And the same is true when we cut silver coins into bits and pieces of eight.
By the same token, behind the binary logic of digital communication there are
technologies associated with electrical current and electromagnetic radiation.
Electrical current has the two basic states of on or off, and electromagnetic charge has
the two basic states of positive and negative. Of course, electricity can be used
analogically to reproduce sounds and images, but the bias favors the digital. Whenever
digital technologies are developed, for example in sound recordings, in mobile
telephones, and now in video, they replace their analogical equivalents. Interestingly
enough, the first form of electric communication, the telegraph, transmitted messages
analogically using an essentially binary code of dots and dashes (the silence between
the long and short beeps constituted a third type of signal, however), and here too
contemporary digital technologies have rendered Morse code obsolete.
The binary logic of electric technology can be used to represent any number of polar
oppositions, such as yes and no, true and false, up and down, black and white, and of
course the numbers zero and one. But the point is that the true machine language of the
computer is not the base two number system, but the song of the subatomic particle.
Bits are electromagnetic units, and digital communication follows the bias of the
electronic media. That is why McLuhan's analysis of the electric age is so appropriate for
our current digital era (as my colleague, Paul Levinson, 1999, has so thoroughly
demonstrated).
3. The Digital Ages
We may be in a new era of digital communication, but we are certainly not new to digital
communication. That is why I have devoted my third bit to what I call the digital ages .
Nevertheless, I should acknowledge that if we begin with the idea that the physical
universe is an information system, we might conclude that there is only one digital age-
the age of the universe itself. And if we begin with the idea that DNA is genetic code , in
base four rather than binary of course, we might conclude that the digital age begins
with the origin of life. Moreover, if we begin with the idea that digital communication is
present in the nervous system, where individual synapses either fire or do not fire, then
we might conclude that the digital age begins long before primates walked the earth.
Instead, I want to take a human-centered approach, and begin with the origin of our
species. While there is much we do not know, and may never know about hominid
evolution, it is certainly clear that it is speech, language, more generally the capacity for
symbolic communication, that distinguishes homo sapiens . We do not know when
speech began, because sounds leave no traces or fossils, but I think it reasonable to
argue that symbolic communication is what makes us human. And language is our first
form of digital communication, a point made by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas,
and Don Jackson in Pragmatics of Human Communication , a book that helped to shape
the modern field of communication studies when it was published back in 1967. Symbols
are digital because they are discrete units that function as arbitrary representations.
Language allows us to digitize the world, to break it down into manageable units of
information that our minds can process, and ultimately manipulate. And as Watzlawick
and his colleagues note, human beings are the only organisms who use digital modes of
communication, at least in the exteriorized sense.
I know that some people will take exception to what I am saying, and argue that when
we speak of digital communication, we are talking about technology, and language is not
a technology. This distinction is generally based on the fact that language is viewed as
natural, the product of a genetic predisposition in our species, whereas technology is
seen as artificial. I find this distinction absurd, because we would not have technology if
we did not have a genetic predisposition to create it. Evolution has given us a set of
fingers that include opposable thumbs, with which we have made tools and
technologies, and it has given us mouths that include opposable tongues, with which we
have made dialogue and knowledge. Both our fingers and our mouths, each in their own
way, lead to digital communication. And rather than viewing either language or
technology as artificial, I believe we should think of technology as natural, and not only
to our own species. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1959, 1976) has made this
point, as has Lewis Mumford (1952, 1961, 1967, 1970), who is sometimes regarded as
the first media ecologist. Birds build nests, beavers make dams, bees build hives, and
these constructions far exceed in complexity any technological activity that we human
beings engaged in for the vast majority of our time on earth.
What distinguishes us is not our tools, but our talk. And so, our first digital age is based
on speech. Our second digital age is based on forms of notation, and especially writing,
which essentially coincides with the transition from tribal societies to what we think of as
civilization. Numerical notation is needed to deal with increasingly more complex
economies, and the development of calendars, weights, and measures is part of the
process. The first complete writing system was developed by Sumerian accountants in
ancient Mesopotamia circa 3500 B. C. E., according to Denise Schmandt-Besserat
(1992, 1996). The first writing systems, known as logographic writing, used a single
character to stand for an entire word, much like the numeral five (5) stands for the entire
sound ("five," "cinco," "cinq," "fünf," etc.). This was sufficient to divide complete
vocalizations into discrete visual symbols, as we do not necessarily pause in between
words when we speak.
Moreover, in keeping accounts and making lists, writing separated subject from
predicate in a way that would be highly unusual in everyday discourse. We do not go
around saying "a cow, a rooster, seventeen chickens, twenty-three bushels of wheat," (if
we did, the response would be, "what about them, what are you trying to say?"). As Jack
Goody (1977) argues, writing decontextualizes language in numerous ways, taking
words out of the concrete context that helps to establish their meaning. It follows that all
forms of digitization involve a process of decontextualization, constantly requiring us to
re-establish contexts and search for meaning.
The development of phonetic writing systems represented a further digitization of
speech. First, words were represented by characters that stood for entire syllables (for
example, one character for ba , another for be , and still others for bi , bo , bu , etc.).
Then came the Semitic aleph-bet, which reduced the syllables down to a single
consonant (for example the letter bet , ancestor our letter b ). Neil Postman (1985) has
argued that the Second Commandment of Moses, the prohibition against the making of
graven images, was intended to eliminate the analogic mode of communication through
pictures, in order to reinforce the digital mode of communication associated with literacy.
The ancient Greeks picked up the aleph-bet from Phoenician traders, adding vowels to
make it more effective. In Greek myths, it is a Phoenician, King Cadmus, who invented
the alphabet, and also sowed dragon's teeth to grow an army. I cannot help but point out
that the ancient bite of the dragon leads us to the contemporary byte of the ASCII
alphanumeric code. Or to give an example of the continuing significance of the second
digital age to our own, it turns out that while the fax machine was adopted relatively
rapidly in Japan, the diffusion of e-mail was somewhat slow, especially in comparison to
Korea. The explanation is simple enough. Korea uses an alphabet. Japan uses a
syllabic writing system that consists of close to one hundred different characters (while
also drawing on Chinese ideograms and our own Roman letters), making it more difficult
to use a keyboard, and more desirable to write by hand and transmit a facsimile
(Fouser, 2001).
During the second digital age, writing and especially the alphabet opened the door to
many forms of digitization. In Asia Minor, in a kingdom heavily influenced by Greek
culture, the Lydians minted the first coins, the ancestors of the ocho reales. This
occurred in the seventh century B.C.E., not long after the introduction of the Greek
alphabet, and constituted the first complete form of economic digitization. In the nearby
Greek colony of Ionia, the first philosophers used coins and the alphabet as an analogy,
arriving at the first theory that all matter is composed of discrete units, that is, atoms.
During the sixth century B.C.E., the Semitic aleph-bet reached India, where it was
gradually adapted and adopted; in its wake came the Hindu invention of the number
zero and positional notation, without which we would not have much in the way of
mathematics (Logan, 2004). In terms of numeracy alone, this was the beginning of a
new digital age. At some point around the thirteenth century C.E. in Europe, in one of
the isolated islands of alphabetic literacy known as monasteries, time was digitized by
the invention of the mechanical clock (Landes, 2000; Mumford, 1934). Lewis Mumford
maintains that this was the beginning of the process of mechanization and
industrialization, reason enough to consider it the beginning of a new digital age.
The alphabet was a necessary precondition for the invention of Gutenberg's printing
press in the fifteenth century, a point that Walter Ong (1982) stresses. In and of itself,
forms of printing go back to prehistory, and a significant development in the history of
printing was the first minting of coins in ancient Lydia. What Gutenberg accomplished
was the digitization of print along the lines of the alphabet, by breaking the single image
or page down into metal bits, otherwise known as moveable type, which can be put
together, broken apart, and rearranged in innumerable combinations. And by producing
multiple, identical copies of texts, typography brought with it a new emphasis on
standardization, in the making of books, in spelling, grammar and education, in legal
systems based on written laws and codes, and in weights and measures, leading to the
uniformity of the metric system.
As the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) has documented, the printing revolution in
early modern Europe made possible the rise of modern science. And with it came
experimentation with electricity, such as Benjamin Franklin conducted in the eighteenth
century. In this sense, the Enlightenment brought with it a new digital age based on the
dialectics of the positive and negative charges that Franklin discovered, the dots and
dashes that Samuel Morse employed in his telegraph, and the dialectic of on and off that
accompanied Thomas Edison's light bulb. And electrical technologies lead us in turn to
such mid-twentieth century developments as Claude Shannon's information theory
(Shannon & Weaver, 1949), Norbert Wiener's (1950, 1961) cybernetics, and the first
electronic digital computers.
We can therefore consider eight overlapping and interrelated digital ages, the ages of
speech, of writing, of the alphabet, of the zero and positional notation, of the clock and
mechanization, of typography, of electricity, and finally the computer. This keeps us to
the theme of the number eight. Of course, there is more than one way to cut our ocho
reales, and media ecologists often focus on four ages, or types of culture, or media
environments. The first is associated with speech and orality, the second with writing by
hand, the third with printing, and the fourth with the electronic media. When you slice
things up in this way, we can see that we have undergone a series of digitizations, as
speech, the first form of digital communication, is digitized by writing, writing is digitized
by print, and print in turn has been digitized by electronic technologies. You might say
that human beings have a genetic predisposition towards digitizing, and through this
process we transform our environments, and ourselves.
4. Cut, Copy, and Paste
I have made frequent reference to the cutting of the ocho reales into pieces of eight, and
also to the function of the bit of information in cutting possibilities in half, and for my
fourth bit I want to return to the logic of cutting, and the basic tools known as cut, copy,
and paste. But first, let me note that for almost all of the past three million years, high
tech took the form of tool kits consisting of sharpened pieces of stone (see, for example,
Leaky & Lewin, 1978). These tool kits included three types of stone knives, one for
skinning and otherwise preparing meat, another for working with vegetables and fruits,
and a third used to create other tools out of wood and bone. The tool kits were
ubiquitous in our prehistory to an extent that is truly extraordinary, as they are found
across a vast range of climates and habitats, across isolated populations separated by
great distances, and most remarkably, across different species of hominids. The stone
tools themselves were subject to surprisingly little innovation or evolution over this long
period of time that came to an end with a creative explosion that laid the foundations for
modern technological societies approximately 30,000 years ago (Pfeiffer, 1982).
The distance from the stone chips of the hominids to the silicon chips of home
computers seems unimaginable. And yet it is all but instantaneous in comparison to the
millions of years during which the prehistoric tool kit served as the indispensable key to
the survival and success of our evolutionary ancestors. Moreover, these two moments of
stone and silicon are connected by a "missing link"-the technologies of writing and
printing. The stone knife used to sharpen, carve and fashion other tools out of wood and
bone also could make marks on their surfaces, both accidental and purposeful, both
aesthetic and symbolic.
Just as our ancestors used stone tools to hunt, gather, and process their food, we use
digital tools to hunt and gather alphanumeric data, and to process words, numbers,
images, and sounds. Of course, we have a great many tools in our digital tool kits, but
there is, I would argue, a contemporary equivalent to the three stone knives of
prehistory: Cut, Copy, and Paste. I would go so far as to say that these three commands
are archetypes of word processing and computer programming, and that they are
possibly ideal, certainly exemplary forms of the human activity of tool-use. As such, the
basic function of Cut, Copy, and Paste is the modification and manipulation of human
environments. These digital tools influence and alter our information environment, much
as the prehistoric tool kit was used to act on the natural environment. Of the three, Cut is
clearly a direct descendant of the stone knife, and would have to be the most basic
activity as it can be performed with teeth (the first bit and bite of information). It follows
that Cut appears first in the Edit menu of current operating systems.
Copying comes next, and the ubiquity of the stone knives themselves over millions of
years is a testament to the primacy of the act of copying. No doubt cutting came first,
through the use of found objects. But copying implies the deliberate manufacture of
cutting tools, not just tool use but tool making. It represents a great leap forward in
technological development as well as biological evolution, a milestone on the road to
humanity. As for paste, it is a tool whose traces are wiped out over time, in contrast to
the stone knives that speak to us across millions of years, and it is therefore difficult to
discuss the origins of pasting with any certainty. However, it seems reasonable to
conclude that our evolutionary ancestors noticed the adhesive properties of certain
substances, and employed them in limited ways prior to the creative explosion. Paste
therefore is appropriately listed last of the three in the Edit menu, and its development
may well have been based on the processing of animal and vegetable products that
stone knives made possible.
Whatever their origins, we can certainly conclude that cutting, copying, and pasting
originate as prehistoric technical activities, as methods of manipulating the environment.
Moreover, these three tools cover the most basic types of technological operations:
Cutting implies taking a whole and breaking it into smaller parts. Pasting implies joining
together separate parts to form a larger whole. And copying implies the repetition of
either or both of the other two actions in order to achieve similar results. We can also
see here the beginnings of arithmetic operations.
When the same operations are applied to language and writing, we are able to edit
reality and edit our own digital communication. In other words, another basic function of
Cut, Copy, and Paste is the modification and manipulation of symbolic environments.
And this in turn implies the modification and manipulation of technological environments,
and with it the notion of progress. In fact, editing brings with it new standards of
perfection, and new ideals of perfectibility. This has been cause for concern, especially
when applied to DNA.
Of course, the digital tool kit reflects the biases of binary code, in that what is really
being manipulated are bits of information. And because we are dealing with bits of
information and not material substances, manipulation is fairly easy to accomplish. Our
contemporary digital world appears to be infinitely malleable, and this makes it difficult to
recognize the limitations of biology, and physics. Or economics. When printing made the
mass production of texts profitable, copyright legislation followed, and patents,
trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property rights followed the precedent of
copyright. As the electronic media displace typography, Cut, Copy, and Paste
operations become all too easy to perform, and we see these rights increasingly
disregarded, while many of us, especially in academia, confront the problem of
plagiarism. This is the bias of the electronic media, and the online world also retrieves in
certain way the old gift economy in new form. Oddly enough, just as the old, industrial-
based Communism was collapsing in Europe, the Internet was giving us a new kind of
cybercommunism (Barbrook, 2002, in print).
5. Cybertime
The activity of cutting with tools comes early in human evolution, probably long before
the evolution of speech. Language brings with it the ability to preserve information over
time, and pass it on from generation to generation, what Alfred Korzybski (1993) called
time-binding. It also brings an awareness of time, and the activity of time-keeping,
especially through notational systems. And this brings me to my fifth bit, cybertime , a
concept I have discussed at length elsewhere. Computers represent the convergence of
a number of different technologies, and one of them is the mechanical clock, the first
form of automatic machinery. Like the computer, the clock is a device that manufactures
no physical products, but instead produces pure information. Moreover, as Lewis
Mumford (1934) makes clear, the clock's main function is to coordinate and synchronize
activities and events. It is an early technology of control, a forerunner of cybernetics and
computing (Beniger, 1986; Bolter, 1984; Weizenbaum, 1976; Wiener, 1950, 1961).
The digital computer actually incorporates an electronic clock within its central
processor, which controls the computer's functions. The clock's frequency (number of
cycles per second, measured by the million in megahertz) determines the computer's
processing speed, and it is not unusual for computers to incorporate additional clocks to
perform other functions (Wyant & Hammerstron, 1994). Like dedicated timepieces, the
computer clock can be used to measure duration, determine the present point in time,
and even provide alerts along the lines of an alarm clock. The function of the clock is to
tell the time of the outside world, but while traditional timepieces only measure time's
passage, and are not seen as creating time out of whole cloth, the central processor
does generate time for the computer's internal world. This electronic heartbeat is time
insofar as the computer's microworld is concerned.
Cybertime is digital time, and this means something more than the digital display of time
in clocks and watches that do not use the traditional clock face. But it is worth noting that
digital timepieces, which were introduced to the consumer market in the late 1960s,
have been criticized because they present a discrete and decontextualized sense of
time. The traditional clock face provides a context that includes every possible time of
day, out of which we calculate the "correct" time. It therefore provides a sense of past
and future, so that we reckon the time as so many minutes before or after the hour,
rather than as a continual accumulation of units. Clearly, clock faces represent time as
circular and cyclical, while the digital display gives us a much more linear sense of time.
Digital time is not just a quantitative measurement of time, but also a quantitative
concept of time, time as a sequence of numbers, and time as a series of bits of
information. And as information, digital time can be processed by the computer,
subjected to statistical and symbolic manipulation. Digital time is entirely arbitrary,
completely divorced from natural rhythms and human perceptions, and therefore entirely
controllable and malleable.